About the talk:

To assess “what is happening to the family?” in the United States, we need to understand basic trends in family patterns. An area in which there are gaps in our knowledge—but is of deep importance to individuals and the public—is trends in divorce. Prior research shows declining divorce rates since the late 1970s. Does this mean that marriages have become more stable? This talk evaluates several potential threats to this interpretation including issues of data quality, the increasing selectivity of marriage, changes in population age composition, and variation by education and race/ethnicity, and outlines the implications of the findings for our understanding of trends in divorce.

About the speaker:

Christine Schwartz is a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received her PhD in Sociology from UCLA and her bachelor’s degree from Reed College. Schwartz is a family demographer who studies change in marriage patterns, divorce, cohabitation, and fertility and how they are affected by and affect inequality. She currently serves as the Associate Director of the Center for Demography and Ecology at UW-Madison.